I’ve worked successfully with adults of all ages suffering anxiety, depression, complex bereavement, damaged confidence, difficulties in relationships, worries about sexual life, creative and work-related troubles, and chronic pain.

 
 
 
 

  • I am an accredited member of UKCP and a member of the College of Psychoanalysts. I completed my training at The Guild of Psychotherapists. The UKCP provides an ethical framework I am obliged to abide by and my clinical work is professionally supervised.

    I have offered individual therapy in private practice; at the Guild of Psychotherapists Reduced-fee Clinic; at the Charter clinic, where I also co-facilitated a regular psychotherapy group, and in the NHS.

  • I offer psychoanalytic psychotherapy to individuals - mainly but not exclusively longer-term, more open-ended therapy that brings about deep change.

    My approach is pluralist, psychoanalytic and relational. I aim to establish a good therapeutic relationship with the people I see, the better to approach any present tangles, traces of past experience and troublesome inner conflicts.

  • TELEPHONE

    07866 439952

    EMAIL

    sw@sarahwoodpsychotherapy.com

Philosophy and Practice

 

Before retiring to concentrate on being a psychotherapist I spent many years working in universities. My DPhil and first book were on the poet Robert Browning. Henry James said that of all those buried in Poets’ Corner ‘none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’ Interests in literature, painting, film and other art forms influence how I understand my psychotherapy practice.

At Oxford I joined a reading group to study Jacques Derrida, whose thinking and writing on psychoanalysis and everything else remain important to me. I started to read psychoanalytic stuff — independently and in a group my friend’s mum called The Freud Squad, participated in a feminist theory study group and another that read Deleuze, got seriously interested in Leo Bersani and as a young academic heard Hélène Cixous’ wonderful Amnesty lecture on freedom. At the moment I am in a group reading Fred Moten. I retired from academia in 2018.

 

I still occasionally write. I was for twelve years delighted to be an editor of Oxford Literary Review: my last issue was Ext: Writing Extinction in 2019. I remain a founding editor of the wide-ranging theoretical humanities journal Angelaki and edited two special issues:  Home and Family and Hotel Psychoanalysis.

Reading and writing, like therapy, are ways of picking up vital signs that have gone unnoticed. They make it possible to say things that have not yet been said, or need saying again. They can bring people together and help them find themselves more truly and more strange.